Parrot’s S.L.A.M.dunk! The New Drone Development Kit

The development kit for autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance for drones and robotic platforms.

Parrot, the pioneer in consumer and professional civil drones, announces an open development kit for the design of advanced applications for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, indoor navigation and 3D mapping for drones and other robotic platforms in environments with multiple barriers and where GPS signals are not available.

S.L.A.M. technology enables the drone to understand and map its surroundings in 3D and to localize itself in environments with multiple barriers and where GPS signals are not available.

With an embedded NVIDIA® Tegra® K1 processor, ParrotS.L.A.M.dunk allows implementation of the latest algorithms of computer vision and autonomous navigation that are optimized for NVIDIA® GPU. In addition, the ParrotS.L.A.M.dunk is optimized to minimally impact the battery life of the drone.

ParrotS.L.A.M.dunk integrates several sensors:

A fish-eye stereo camera with a 1500×1500 resolution at 60fps

An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)

An ultrasound sensor

A magnetometer

A barometer

Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk: An open kit designed for developers

Parrot developed S.L.A.M.dunk to be as easy and user-friendly as possible for developers, researchers, integrators and academics. Sensors and algorithms are fully integrated in order to speed the design of advanced applications for drones and robotic platforms.

All Ubuntu functionalities and benefits from ROS (Robot Operating System) framework are embedded in the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk making it user-friendly. The HDMI port makes it possible to develop directly on the product.

Weighing less than 4.9oz (140g), Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk fits on various types of Linux-based drones and robotic platforms including quadcopters and fixed-wings, rolling robots and articulated arms, with the help of mount kits.

Once placed, Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk should be linked to the battery of its host-drone by a 3.5mm jack cable and a USB cable in order to send and receive information and commands to and from the drone.

Developed by robotic researchers for robotic researchers, Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk is a “ready-to-use” module that will accelerate the development of tomorrow’s application for drones and robotic platforms.